Page 192 of Love Me Stalk Me
I bury my face in my hands, feeling the heat rise to my cheeks despite my best efforts to remain composed.
"What?" she’s unrepentant. "I'm just saying?—"
"Please stop saying." I peek through my fingers, fixing her with a glare that lacks any real heat. "Immediately. This second. No more words from you."
She laughs, refilling both of our glasses with the last of the wine, the bottle making a gurgling sound as it empties. "Alright, fine. But when you do finally ride him," she lifts a finger, pointing it at me with mock sternness, "I expect a full debrief. Not necessarily with diagrams, but I wouldn't say no to some visual aids."
I groan, grabbing a dumpling from the takeout container and shoving it in my mouth to avoid having to respond. The food is lukewarm now, but I'm drunk enough that it still tastes amazing.
"Never happening."
Amanda sips her wine with an expression that says she doesn't believe me. "We'll see."
At this point, we're both deep in the wine haze.
That perfect, warm, everything is hilarious level of drunk where literally nothing makes sense but everything is the funniest shit we've ever heard. Where conversations loop and circle and drift, where time seems to stretch and compress in strange ways, where even the most mundane observations feel profound.
Amanda is digging through her bag, searching for something—I don'teven know what, probably her lip gloss, because she's obsessed with reapplying it even when she's alone in her own apartment—when she suddenly starts rummaging through mine.
"Amanda, that is my purse." My words come out slightly slurred, my brain struggling to catch up with what my eyes are seeing.
She pauses. Looks up at me, her hand still deep in my handbag. Then bursts into hysterical laughter.
Like, full-body, wheezing, tears-in-her-eyes laughter that makes her double over, clutching her stomach as if she's just heard the funniest joke ever told.
I watch her with a mixture of confusion and amusement.
"Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?"
She can't even get the words out at first, still laughing as she pulls something small and familiar from my purse. Something packaged in a discreet, elegant box that immediately sobers me the hell up and a jolt of panic through my wine-addled brain.
Oh. Fuck.
"What do we have here?" she teases, waving the box in front of me like she just won the lottery, like she's discovered buried treasure in the depths of my purse.
I freeze.
My entire brain short-circuits.
Because oh my fucking God.
I completely forgot that was in there.
I was hiding it from Cal the first day he stayed over, stuffed it in my purse in a panic, and then never put it back in my nightstand. It's been sitting there, forgotten until this moment, a ticking time bomb just waiting to be discovered.
And now, here we are.
Amanda gasps, eyes wide and delighted by her discovery. "Wait. Is this what I think it is?"
My face goes up in flames, heat rushing to my cheeks so quickly I swear I can feel the blood vessels dilating. I grab for the box, but she yanks it away, laughing as she holds it out of my reach.
"Oh my God. Izzy."
I groan, covering my face with my hands, mortification washing over me in waves. "Amanda, do not open that."
She's already flipping open the box, completely ignoring my plea, her curiosity far outweighing any sense of boundaries or propriety.
"Why not?" she teases, peering inside with undisguised interest. "It's not like I don't have one of my own?—"
